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April 05, 2010

Personalized Energy for 1 (× 6 Billion)

Prof. Daniel G. Nocera, MIT

A program of the MIT FACULTY FORUM and the MIT Club of the Delaware Valley

We are extremely pleased to have MIT Professor Daniel Nocera to speak to us on a unique view of the energy future – personalized solar energy. Prof. Nocera will discuss his innovative research in the field of solar energy. His approach to the sustainable energy challenge is to seek a solution that provides personalized solar energy—the capture and storage of solar energy at the individual level. Such a solution addresses three essentials—the energy is plentiful, it is carbon neutral, and it is secure. Personalized energy is secure because it is highly distributed and the individual controls the energy on which she/he lives. Moreover, because energy use scales with wealth, point-of-use solar energy will put individuals, in the smallest village in the non-legacy world and in the largest city of the legacy world, on a more level playing field. Finally, solar energy is plentiful and has the potential to supply the increasing global energy demand which is expected to double by mid-century and triple by 2100, reaching a total of 6 billion people.

The possibility of generating terawatts of carbon-free energy, and thus providing society with its most direct path to realizing a low-greenhouse-gas future, would require inexpensive high-throughput manufacturing. Current options to harness and store solar energy at the individual level are too expensive to be implemented, especially in a non-legacy world—thus the need to develop new materials, reactions and processes that would enable this to become a reality. Prof. Nocera’s group has pioneered studies of the basic mechanisms of energy conversion in biology and chemistry. He has recently accomplished a solar fuels process that captures many of the elements of photosynthesis outside of the leaf. This discovery sets the stage for a storage mechanism for the large-scale, distributed deployment of solar energy.

Special note: We realize that this date conflicts with a particular religious holiday, but this is the only date that Prof. Nocera would be able to meet with us during his travels.

Daniel Nocera is the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT, Director of the Solar Revolutions Project and Director of the Eni Solar Frontiers Center. He has received numerous awards for his contributions to the development of renewable energy and was named in Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. He is also a frequent guest on TV (CNN, ABC Nightline, PBS, ABS Nature’s Edge, Jim Lehrer News Hour, NOVA, CBS, CNBC, Discovery Channel, The Science Channel and Plum in the U.S. and Explora and RAI in Europe), radio (NPR, Bloomberg News, CBS, BBC, All Things Considered, Here and Now, Climate Connections, Voice of America) and is regularly featured in print (New York Times, National Geographic, Forbes, Discover, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, The New Republic, U.S. News and World Report, Outside Magazine, Wired, Technology Review). He currently sits on several advisory boards and in 2008 he founded Sun Catalytix, a company committed to bringing personalized energy to the non-legacy world.